be kind to yourself. Make an unconditional commitment to be kind to your experience, whatever it is, as it unfolds for you.

And when you notice yourself becoming aggressive or unkind, return to your commitment, over and over. Use this as your object of meditation radical self-kindness. This work is very counter-intuitive, and requires that you turn toward those difficult feelings and emotions that you have spent your lifetime avoiding, in an attempt to protect yourself and keep yourself safe and from feeling survival level panic. As you move underneath the deeply rooted conclusions that youve come to (intelligently so) you can see for yourself, in your own direct experience, if the mere presence of these somatic-emotional movements are actually harming you, or if they are what you have concluded them to be. It is very important for you to go slow, and when these emotions arise, to receive them in as kind a way as possible, reembody, and see if you can start to explore the raw sensations that are there, underneath the storyline, the narrative, and re-discover what these energies actually are. They have served you in many ways, and it can be very helpful to see this, and how they represent the best ways you knew to care for yourself, protect yourself, and ensure your own psychic, emotional, and even physical survival. It is so important not to wage war against them, though it is very common to do so, especially for spiritually oriented people who have come to believe so deeply (and often unconsciously) that these emotions shouldnt be there, mean something about how spiritual they are, point to the ways they arent devoted enough, praying enough, meditating enough, arent awakened enough, are lost in the ego, have a self, etc. In my experience, these fears, unbearable feelings and emotions, and all of our traumatic wounding arose in interpersonal contexts, in relation with our early caregivers and in our early environments. As such, it is via a relational field that they are most naturally unwound, unfolded, illuminated, and transformed. It can be difficult to do this work in a deeply somatic way on ones own, includiing through solo -oriented meditation or other contemplative practice. Accessing transpersonal states of consciousness, while profound and healing in its own right, does not necessary touch this dimension of experience that I am referring to (unfortunately). In addition to your spiritual practice, if you have one, I would recommend finding a somatic oriented therapist that you trust and feel can attune to you and your body/psyche/ emotional world, and can help you on this journey of metabolization. Also, Ruchi, I fully agree with what youre saying here and feel it is important. It can very quickly become self aggressive to continue to go into difficult material and just do nothing and simply ignite more suffering and resistance. This is not helpful, and is actually unkind. Again, depending on the nature of the early unresolved material, it can be extremely difficult to do this work on ones own. This sort of work must be done very slowly, a little bit at a time. As you notice yourself becoming aggressive to your experience, or becoming unkind to it, or overly frustrated that you cant stay with it, etc. it is important to stop, to take a break, rather than continue to be aggressive, which only further entrenches the material within you. It can be so helpful to find a way to create a true holding environment from which you can approach this material as, for many, it will almost always (at some point) trigger very intense panic and feelings of survival-level risk. Finally, it is not necessary that you reconcile what has happened in the past. Though it may seem and sound this way, this work has very little to do with the past. Once you move into the body (again, a good therapist can be so helpful here, and even quite necessary for many, in my experience) you may discover that all of this material is being actively (though not consciously) maintained in the present. This work is not about going into the past (which is not actually possible) but rather inviting more and more awareness, over and over, as to how we turn from our immediate embodied experience, and the emotional conclusions we have come to about it. The goal here of this work, from one perspective, is freedom, is the cultivation of more and more freedom, which ironically, can be found inside the core of difficult experience; it is not found by getting rid of challenging emotions. When the actual nature of emotions and feelings can be directly experienced, a process of self-liberation tends to unfold.

Matt Licata